Monday, July 16, 2012

The comments section is no place for a politics discussion.

It's obvious really. Every time one of my friends has said something boneheaded about politics on the book of face I've had to bite my tongue or risk having the comments thread turn into something horrendous and not easy to read. It works sometimes when there's only a few commenter's and it's a quick back and forth between them - pundit.co.nz is a good example of this. On the pages of the herald website though, every single time I read the comments (I don't do it often) the head suddenly feels an inexplicable need to find a hard surface with which to hit itself. From people declaring that attempts to initiate a referendum to negate the tenuous mandate the government insists it has is undemocratic (i.e. those collecting signatures are sore losers) on Matt McCarten's opinion piece. Or the commenters agreeing with Rodney that the ETS and climate change is a scam - it's bad enough that they're applauding the presence of an "alternative" view as if that actually validates it. Sigh.
note to self: stop reading the comments.